TRASHFUTURE - All My Bulls, Gone feat. Heidi Swart

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

The gang discusses the inevitable crypto crash, tether, and the charlatans who sold ordinary people down the river. We also review Britain’s strategy for dealing with its many overlapping crises including mental health. Then, we speak to journalist Heidi Swart (@heidi_swart), whose work for the MIT technology review is all about how the surveillance industry is slowly rebuilding apartheid in South Africa. Read Heidi's article here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/19/1049996/south-africa-ai-surveillance-digital-apartheid If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Milo has shows coming up in Brighton. Learn more here! https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

The current putative front-runner at this point, or at least the people that the press have knighted as their sort of sensible moderate who's going to save them from either electoral relevance or scary policies, is now West Streeting, a man who's literal only experience other than just climbing the greasy pole of the fucking Labour Party, is being in charge of the national union of students. Yeah, he's purely a creature of student politics, which is fantastic. It's exactly what we need. I think it's because, I think no one ever understood who's sort of trotted out that student politics thing is that student politics is only ever about, or at least a great, all the

people who are like, get big in student politics. All the people we don't like in student politics. What I think is all the people who get big in student politics, these are the people who are just imitating what the adults are doing, which I think is why West Streeting seems like such a haunted doll and so uncanny. Do you kids want to be like the real Labour Party, or do you just want to squabble and waste time? I mean, it's also like student politics during a period of time. I was sort of tangentially involved in student politics in my final year in a very, very minor

role. And look where you ended up. Hey, you're talking to the former student vice president of Langside College until that college went bankrupt and merged with number three. I was sort of just like, I had some minor sort of officer role, which involved me going to council meetings once a term. And I didn't go to that. But my partner, who I also got elected, was very, very into it in a way that was very much

someone who would have very much fantasized about being in the Labour Party. But I think it was also this period of time where there was a conflict over what the NUS should be, because crucially, at least when I was at uni, it was about the time when the student fees were going up as the coalition was set up. And there were demands that the NUS should be a lot more radical about getting fees down and renegade, especially because the Lib Dems had sold this promise for such a long time. And that was placed in conflict with other NUS people, especially NUS people who had stayed in student roles well past graduation date, who very much had their eye on going into

Labour Party politics and crucially trying to revive new labourism. And I think Wes Streasing is a very good example of the kind of guy a lot of student politics people between 2009 to 15 wanted to be. One of the guys who helped deliver, like bringing the NUS to heal a bit. I always felt that the student politics in general was a bit of a soft play area for some of the more insane people at any university. I always appreciate that whenever some people are mad at me online, it always comes up that I ran for the Cambridge Student Union presidency as a joke.

And it's like, oh yeah, and he thought it was funny to take the piss out of the Cambridge University Students' Union. It's like, yeah. Wait, where'd you go? I was at Anglia Ruskin just to join. The reason why I was vice president at the equally prestigious Langside College in Glasgow was because I ran for president also as a joke and placed second. So, okay, Keir Starmer. Electoral advice, proven strategy.

A man who ran for the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom as a joke and placed second, yes. claim you're going to make Julia Fox everyone's girlfriend. Ryan is a joke. That's basically what he's doing. Just do what I did. Make a sort of faux socialist, realist, Stalinist poster, which I have since scrubbed off the internet. So, if you find that poster DM me joking, you can't, my DMs are closed.

Look, there's some politics afoot. There's also some developments in technology afoot. I want to talk for like five minutes about the poll. By the way, hi, it's TF everyone. What? Yeah, sorry, this wasn't just a phone call between friends. I was told that I was going on the Red Scare podcast. I'm very disappointed.

I will be locked up. I'm sorry. Thanks for some ice in this can of vanilla coke so I can like get the noise going. I'm sorry, this is actually the Romania acts, I'm afraid. Once again. Welcome to the National Union of Students podcast. So, to think some shit's happened, right? Oh, not again.

But number one, this is TF. It is Riley, Milo, Alice and Hussein. It's the free one. And God damn it, he was right. Finally figured out my clever plan. This is student TF. It's a lot like regular TF, but it's a lot more annoying. So, it's correct.

My new plan is beating his beans for weeks. You have the pedant that like just wants to council meetings go back on time. You have the guy who like won't shut up about going to Cambridge. You have the guy who just sort of just like ran because they won't like boost their CV, but doesn't want to be there. That would be me. Yeah. I mean, if you're at Cambridge, everyone's the guy who won't shut up.

Okay. So, I was trying to fool Milo out of doing this, the free one thing this time by making it indistinguishable from when we went into from pre-show chat into show. And yet again, he has bested me. I may not be smart, but I've got instincts like a horse. Yeah. That's a beautiful sentence. That's going to be running through my mind for a while.

Like a horse. I'm slightly paraphrasing something Nate told me one of his commanding officers once said to him about a certain kind of attractive woman. I knew I had the like imprimatur of a military on me. So, one of the things that we've done today is in addition to having all of this, you know, a jiving and capering up front, we are actually going to be in about in this some amount of time. We're going to be talking to a journalist and privacy researcher from South Africa, Heidi

Swart about her, an article she co-authored about how digital surveillance is sort of bringing back a lot of the apartheid era kind of by stealth. We're going to have a bit of a serious chat. We're going to, you're going to get your dessert and then your vegetables. And throughout that segment, you can note how much I'm straining not to do a particular voice despite constant invitations to do so from the source material. Yes, that's right. But look, Father McMurphy, of course.

Here's the thing. Last time we spoke, we were talking with Brett Scott and we sort of noted, hey, that's interesting. One of those algorithmic stablecoins that seems to be always sort of vaguely like that someone has, I don't know, put a giant pyramid on top of a knife, balanced on a tightrope that somehow is the future of the economy, seems to be kind of like it's stablecoin is de-pegged, it seems to be in some trouble. Well, update.

Just coming off of the crypto implosion ticker. Yeah. Well, my Ape's gone to zero. Absolutely. Oh, many people will be financially right. Yeah. That's kind of what I wanted to talk about, right? When we last spoke, it was Monday of last week.

And that's the episode you'll have heard on Thursday. And so now rather than just the calendar podcast. A real peek into the TF workflow. So that was the past, but at the time it was the present. So try to keep up. But so basically rather than just like de-pegging, the entire Terra Luna algorithmic stablecoin ecosystem just seems to have unraveled with trading halted. And I believe Terra having gone to a big flat zero.

Oh, nice. And Luna being worth not much more. The knock-on effects from this have been so funny. Dogecoin has plummeted. Even fucking Bitcoin has plummeted. I want to explain a little bit of the mechanics of how this happened. And then we'll talk about like, you know, what? Because everything was built together in some kind of like house of cards.

Dogecoin has plummeted. That's going to piss off the Venetians. Might have to do another fourth crusade. Might have to do another 46 rounds of choosing. So basically, right, is that much like the normal normal banks. You're about to land a history joke. You adopt the sort of like late night voice. It's perfect.

What this like round of choosing music. Paul for a David Letterman sort of riffing back and forth about the method in which with which the doge was chosen like once it had no longer really been that much of a democracy if it ever even was some Enrico Dandolo. I mean, yeah, that Janissaries poll. Was that the other guys? No, so basically, right, is that all of these different stable coins, right? They all exist to just lend to one another.

And they just exist to use a lot of the times to like provide liquidity to one another. Right. So there's just a lot of interbank lending. But unlike 2008, where that interbank lending at least gave some people some houses for a little while, this all of this interbank lending has it's just not connected to the real economy at all. But what it means, right? We're doing the subprime mortgage crisis, but like dumber and faster. Way faster.

That's Apes. With more Apes. The subprime Apes. Like the various like the fuse of the dynamite that was lit for the subprime mortgage crisis. Like that dynamite was laid like back in the fucking 70s. Whereas it seems like we sort of had like an inch long fuse for this particular crisis. Where it's just like projects would bubble up, would sort of swell up and pop kind of like just like a foam.

But so Apes are very irascible, you know. Yeah. A delicious old cuisine foam. So what would happen, right, is let's give an example of Tether, which by the way, at the time of recording, has also de-pegged. Tether, of course, being the by far the hugest stablecoin. Tens of billions of dollars of value in Tether. Well, I presume it will be fine once Tether produce all of the evidence of all of that

cash value backing that they have. So they basically they have, if you remember, they have some cash, some precious metals. But most of it is just in short-term commercial paper, which means like debts. And the thing is, like lending and credit. And the thing is, some people were like, oh yeah, maybe that's Chinese property companies. Who knows? I personally think that because the DeFi system requires so much lending and credit on the blockchain already, a lot of that short-term commercial paper, I would bet, is just other

DeFi projects, like for example, Terra Luna. And so all of a sudden, when one crashes, it can then it ends up having all of a sudden, it's like, wait a minute, all of my short-term commercial paper to Terra Luna is now worthless, which means that Tether is going to de-peg, which means that or whatever caused it to de-peg. So the 2008 crisis happened in large part because banks would like call in loans to other banks, which were also all doomed packages of loans. This is like this, except what they're calling in is not a house, but instead, oh, our thing is also made up because everybody thought everybody else was the only person who was

doing a real thing and they were just bluffing. It's like, for example, Terra Luna works. It says the stablecoin works because there's a swap you can do between that one and the one that fluctuates in value. And the idea is that it doesn't bother the details, but that you can always swap them back and forth in such a way that it tightly hovers around a dollar. But that only works if everyone believes that this is a valuable project that other people want to buy, which in addition to being, again, a scheme in a certain shape, is fucking orc technology. It's only works if everyone believes it hard enough.

Well, I mean, that's true of the real market also, but this is, as we've seen, this is like what if we took away all of the safeguards under this? Or also all of the material reasons to participate in the real market. Yeah. What if we did a second economy as a joke? This is like libertarian and inspectacles, right? They're all getting to learn a lesson about why there are rules. But that's the other thing, right? One of the differences between the crypto economy and the real economy is that because the real economy involves human labor and the making

of things, the real economy isn't necessarily zero sum, right? But the crypto economy is completely zero sum. The only way to get a dollar out of the crypto economy is if someone else puts one in, right? Yeah, cool. And so that means all of this yield farming, these stable coins, these guaranteed returns, whatever, it was just people putting money in and taking it out. But then all it takes, because they're so interrelated with one another at this point, all it takes is one of those tokens, right? If it's big enough, like Tara was, it was a top 10, and then fucking Tether is fucking enormous. Like systemic risk levels of enormous. That all it takes is one person losing their confidence in one. And then it's like a game

of Jenga, but where every single block is completely integral for the entire tower standing up. And also an A. It's a classic bank run, except in service of nothing by idiots. And with none of the like, oh my God. And Doquan, one of the guys behind, like the guy behind Tara. It's a classic Doge run. Yeah, I love, that was my favorite Venetian charity event, the Doge run, where he just tends as a normal guy. All the private empathy firms in Venice are enjoying it. The most serene Republic of Venice fun run, just the weirdest vibes. But though, it's more of a triathlon, the Venice fun run.

So if you think of it that way, right? It's that they're all completely interrelated. They're completely zero sum. And then... It's incestuous. Yeah. And then when one falls apart, yeah, there's this systemic risk, because they all just provide liquidity to one another for the purposes of more effectively providing liquidity to other ones of them, but never actually engaging with anything. But also the other thing, right? So they're kind of like the Habsburgs. They're all fucking each other and making each other

more liquid. An ape filled entirely with water. Here's the fucked up thing, right? Which is that... Oh, here's the fucked up thing. So as Tether, because Tether holds billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars of treasury bills, right? It actually has acquired some of these now. It doesn't mean most of its shit is still not garbage, but there is enough of that. If they're forced to rapidly sell tens of billions of dollars worth of U.S. debt, right?

Or billions of dollars worth of corporate bonds, that affects that market. And that means that the price on those could also crater. And that affects the real fucking economy. Just isn't a shit turn of like very, very stable sort of investment like pensions and stuff heavily into T-bills also. It's not that they could crater T-bills, right? They need to be much bigger than Tether to do that, but they could affect... If you sold all of that at once, that would have an effect on the market.

And that's the other thing. It's not like an orderly unwinding. It's a forced sale of all of it all at once because you've put up... Because what you've done is you've gone to the track... For a forced sale, apes never you. The big place you've done is you've gone to the track and you've bet your house on a horse that isn't racing. Yeah, it's an ape. It's not been allowed to compete. You can't raise that thing. It's an ape.

That's the thing also. Some countries are directly... And that's the other thing. Bitcoin's price is going down as well. Oh, this is... You know who's really going to take a haircut here is El Salvador. And this is the sort of divinely ordained punishment for electing a redditor. Which is why Navalny also needs to stay incarcerated anyway. Oh, joking. Putin reading his intercepted texts and giving the kill order the second he gets to pick will rip. No, so countries like El Salvador, right?

They're heavily invested in Bitcoin, but this contagion also causes Bitcoin to go down because as Tether makes up its own fucking money and prints, it buys Bitcoin, runs up the price, and then with its valuable Bitcoin in its treasury, it's going to be like, well, we can print more Tether because the Bitcoin's worth more. Fantastic. And I mean, this is bad enough without a naïve book like buying the dip and then the dip continuing to dip significantly more. Stop dipping. Stop dipping. But it's talking of buying the dip, right? The other thing is, and this is why I get back around to just remembering

who the fucking boosters of this were. It was celebrities. It was like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. There are real victims here and also perpetrators. On the one hand, it's very easy and fun and profitable to have Schadenfreude, the onion headline man who loses everything in crypto only wishes several thousand more people had warned him. But you think about the society that engenders these things, that has a lot of people in very desperate circumstances and a lot of very rich people telling them that the only way to get rich is quickly and through hustle, and that's what they did. And I mean, you can see this in, for instance, sports. You can see that crypto stuff displacing betting shops as sponsors of sports clubs.

Let me tell you, when I found out there was a private island in the Caribbean full of libertarians and all spent a lot of money on rare apes, I was very disappointed when I got there and sort for myself. But like, no, but like real people are going to fucking window themselves over this. And it's none of the people who are like materially responsible for them being in that position are going to see anything like any consequences. Yeah, well, there's already like on there's that thing that went viral of like on Reddit, like people kind of saying that like they'd lost like all their income and they were like, you know, they were kind of frantic, they were like going to self harm and like commit suicide and stuff like that. All that stuff is

like really kind of like actually heartbreaking to read and listen to. But the reaction to it has sort of been so like Bukele, for example, in reaction to like any sort of Bitcoin kind of collapse is in complete denial about this. And it's like, yeah, well, actually, we bought even more Bitcoin during the dip of like, and then sort of like a string of kind of Krylov emojis or whatever. But like, yeah, that's kind of in the Salvador and Fiora bunker ordering more Bitcoin buys boomer confirmed. Basically, but like, and that's a really scary thing. Because it's like, well, you know, he's been, you know, he's kind of like integrated even more of like this kind of precarious, you know, the economy like an already precarious economy to this like extremely precarious

like financial system, like on the basis that like it gets him lots of retweets whenever he does it. But like, you know, there is that kind of broader thing too, which is that so much of like, you know, to go at the basic at the basis of all sorts of crypto projects is really this kind of, you know, you sort of like getting people who have this unwavering belief and like, you know, that this is the future. And like, this isn't just a future that will benefit them. But this is, you know, by kind of like partaking in crypto and block, you know, blockchain tech and everything, they are like advancing the progress of the world. Yeah, you know what, Riley, that's why you're wrong. This isn't Orc shit, because Orc shit,

all of their technology depends on everybody who's using it, like believing it. This is more like, like designing a thing that only works if the like, rubes who are getting ripped off by it, believe it. And for as long as possible until you get out. And I think like the scary thing about it is, and you know, I think it was either like Ryan Broderick's newsletter, or I think like the real life newsletter, who like, they wrote about this like a few months ago, which is like, well, what happens when like a millenarian project like collapses, right? Or what happens when like, you basically have like a cult that collapses and prophecy fails. Right. And you know, usually that's, that's, I think, when you really like,

you really enter like, quite a bizarre vibe shift. And I was just thinking about like, well, what happens in like, what happens in El Salvador, when this already kind of like very overtly authoritarian government, like, they're sort of like bases of existence completely falls apart. You know, it's going to look like the fucking heavens gate away team in the presidential palace. I'm sorry, the fucking El Salvador Führer Bunkerberg about crypto is really distracting me. My names, what about Lyons? Mine Führer. But I think it's the, it is true, because like the thing is a lot of, there has been a lot of, I think, but like very, very sort of personal invested investment of almost, and again, we've

discussed this before, an almost religious desire for salvation into crypto, because it's the last promise of, here is capitalism without institutions. It will be capitalism, it's going to be the capitalism you always dreamed of. And you know, in a sense, here is capitalism without institutions. We made up all our own money and took all of yours. If you deny me on earth, I'll individe, deny you in front of the ape. Yeah. You know, I mean, and this sort of comes back to the fact of, you know, people or who are either, I don't know, I mean, sort of either insanely irresponsible, deeply cruel or incredibly stupid, such as Matt Hancock.

Loved that Jonathan Safran Furb. Saying Matt Hancock, for example, saying just last week, as he talks about the need to integrate stablecoins into the UK system of payments, yes, you may lose everything, but you may not. I don't know. Matt Hancock here, both a victim and perpetrator. One of the rare ones. Yeah. And like, I don't know, it just, I can't sort of get over the fact that like, there's that, you can't blame the people who sort of, you know, fall for it, right? You can't because they are following every single authoritative voice, right?

They are following the ideology. They are doing the thing that we said they should do. Mark Wahlberg went on TV in the Super Bowl and like, you know, nobody stopped him. Nobody like regulated that. That was perfectly legal. And if it's legal, then it must be a safe enough investment. Yeah, I don't know. It's just, it's seeing it actually happen. Be like Elon Musk, gonna like hustle, gonna be on my grind set. You know, maybe, you know, one guy who made a lot of money off of it. So yeah, no, totally.

And see, but seeing it actually happen, right? To seeing this actually occur. You know, it's just, I don't know. I mean, I'm at the point now where it's like, where you're taking, just remembering who it's actually hurting, taking very little solace in that and remembering that like, but that this doesn't like, like the subprime crisis doesn't work unless there is a whole bunch of people who lose everything because it's ultimately a massive upward transfer of wealth. This is just, it's very similar, right? It's your telling a story. It's your telling, because most forms of credit are essentially about telling a credible story about what's going to happen in the future.

And when you're just, and in this case, right, you are telling a credible story about what's going to happen in the future with your fucking token, but also you're, if you're a bank in 2006, you're telling a credible story about what's going to happen in the future regarding this mortgage being paid back or whatever. In both cases, these were not very credible. They were found to not be very credible. And the people who told these stories, they end up, I don't know, say, leading the vision fund at Softbank, for example, and everyone else ends up, you know, living in a lost... Left holding the bank.

Yeah, kind of become Mr. Masayoshi. So, I don't know. I want to talk also about the, an article, an article that has, I've noticed. I love to talk about an article. I love to talk about an article. The Birmingham Ball Ring Ball, that famous ball, a statue of ball. Yeah, one of, one of, one of now three ball statues, New York, Miami with the crypto ball, which is going to be even funnier and Birmingham. I personally think, you know, the practice of ball fighting is barbaric,

and they shouldn't be doing it in Birmingham anymore. Ball barrack. Ball barrack, that's right. It's when you're barbaric to balls, it's ball barrack. So, the Birmingham Ball Ring Ball, by the way, if you were thinking that maybe Britain's not doing enough about its mental health, listen to this. Very excited to hear what we're doing for the blokes. Well, they're taking the ball and they're taking it away from mental health.

Oh, they're going to make it. No, literally what it says is it's going to disappear. Sorry, we're now doing Job Bluth politics. Do it, doing like Brendan where I'm like taking away figurative artwork from the public space is conceding belatedly to ISIS. So, basically, what's happened is there's a ball statue in Birmingham and it is to... Well, not anymore. Count the mental health.

This would be very funny if they just, this is just part of a plan to steal it. And this is like, it's just how easy it is to get away with this. Now, look, no, we'll bring it back when the mental health is better. When all the chaps have been checked in on. Funny enough, the same rationale that was used to justify 9-11, that we don't really talk about much these days. Also throwing the statue of Edward Coulson in Bristol Harbour, like maybe he was looking for mental health down there.

And that's why they had to equip them is because of that defense. Look, here's the thing. I'm sure that you're all wondering by what logic does the temporary... No, no, I'm not. I'm not wondering that at all. I'm just wondering when someone's going to do it to the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square. Legally speaking, we are not wondering that. No, I mean the authorities.

When is the government going to pick it up and like take it away on the basis of checking in with your blokes and the Churchillian manner? Oh, you've got to keep in mind your blokes. Your Churchill's very yodel, I'll say that. Too many chaps bottle it up, they do. One of the more cursed voice combinations. Too many chaps, Chilean. Not all it up, they do.

Look, really, in many ways, Churchill was Britain's baby Yoda. Okay, look, you're going to hear about the rationale, whether you fucking want to or not. And it's because charities and mental and health bosses have said it will remind people to use quote, no bull when talking about mental health. Yes, let's fucking go. Come on, this is so good.

This is Nathan for you now. This is awesome. Absolute marketing brain. Oh, it's so good. You have two guys going out to Birmingham, they'll point at the empty space, one guy will be noble and the other guy will say mental health and that. Yeah, you know what this is?

This is a matte cartoon, given life. They had like a talking penguin, like a soft toy that they were throwing between each other while they were brainstorming this one. No, the person who holds the penguin talks, it was that kind of a meeting, you just know it. Well, here's the thing though. The ball isn't actually going to be gone.

It's just going to be covered by a box. So they've replaced the ball. Don't ask what's under the box. They've replaced the ball with the big box, the shame cube. That's the mental health box. And this is also they kind of remove the box to the end of this thing and the ball is going to actually be gone. And then they'll be sorry.

Darren Brown strikes again. It's not the best part is they've put like the Samaritan's number on the side of the box. I understand that your heating bills have doubled, but have you considered box? They're taking marketing advice from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford where we went there and so the Pitt Rivers Museum was really famous for having an exhibit of shrunken heads

from like Southeast Asia, somewhere in Indonesia. I'm not sure where they got them. But anyway, and there was a campaign by the students to get the shrunken heads removed from the museum. And so now where the shrunken heads used to be, there's like the massive cabinet that's boxed up and it says on the side of you come to look at the shrunken heads in huge letters.

And then there's like a really long explanation of why the shrunken heads aren't there anymore. And this is so much funnier than having a shrunken head exhibit could possibly be. It's essentially what has happened is, I don't know if they just forgot to think of something and then improvised in the room. But now if you wanted to go see the famous bull

at the Birmingham Bullring, you would only see a box with the Samaritans number on it. So you would be reminded not to use any bull when talking about mental health. When are we going to do a live show in Birmingham? I think we have to visit a city with this kind of dynamism, energy, commitment to the brand. The problem is people are using too much bull

when they talk about the mental health. What I love is just like the extent to which mental health just ends up becoming this kind of catch-all for all of the... Yeah, because it has no cause and it barely fucking has any treatment because you can't get any on the NHS. So it's just this thing of like,

oh, do you feel down sometimes? But not in a dangerous way where you might want to hurt yourself or anything. Just like, do you ever get sad? Of course you fucking do. Everything's terrible. Well, maybe what you need right now is to practice some mindfulness.

Phony, going up to a guy who's about to jump off a bridge and going, don't worry, we've hidden a bull. I know what you're going through and believe me, I thought there was no way out too. I've been to that place, but then I found out that they've encased a bull in a box. We've put a bull in mind jail. That's right.

It's Schrodinger's bull now. It's like the mental... All this mental health stuff, right? It's because it is these... As you said, I think it's not a problem with no causes. It's a problem with many causes. Just the causes... No, no, no.

It's a problem whose causes are an intellectual lacuna. Exactly, yes. It's a problem whose causes cannot ever be addressed. It's like that James Dean film, Rebel, whose causes an intellectual lacuna. If these are problems whose causes... What are you rebelling against? That's an intellectual lacuna.

You're not allowed to know that. It's more like you're not allowed to know that. It's more like it is not allowed to be knowable. Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, there's this great big morass of these problems, and what's so great because the people who want to just say, well, mental health is the root cause of all these problems, not a symptom of other deeper material issues,

is they love making the big gestures because it's free. You can be like, we are actually... Look, reports of depression and... I mean, what can a few sheets of plywood cost to encase a bull and a bit of paint to write the Samaritan's number on there? Not much, I would imagine. A lot cheaper than therapy for all those people in Birmingham. Or a lot cheaper than just, I don't know,

making it so that they have somewhere to live. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's give a bull a place to live. Well, they're putting so many therapists out of business. Every therapist in Birmingham is going to be like, oh, fuck them, encase the bull. I'm fucked. That was like no clients.

That was my last source of clients. People who were like, I'm almost better. I just wish they didn't case a bull. Yeah, that's right. CVT, casing both of them. That's right. I just, I mean, we should encase more stuff. You know, show the world we care.

What else would you encase, Riley? Okay, how about this? Nelson on top of the column. Don't encase the column. You've just got to build a box really high up. Is he encased up there? I can't really tell. I'm pretty sure he is.

Giant Samaritan's number on top. This is... Look, are we able to do anything to actually help the grinding poverty in London? No, no, no. Did you see, did you see that the Dartford Conservatives Council opened a food bank

and in order to celebrate the opening of that new food bank, they had a ribbon cutting with a buffet. I did see that. Yes, I did. That's worse. That's done more to harm more people's mental health than the bull thing could possibly have done

to help it in an afternoon. That alone means that we're going to have to encase 50 pieces of recent public art in the UK. Oh, I'm going to have to. We could do Eric Gil's statue outside the BBC. We could just do that. Box that up. The Angel of the North boxed.

We're going to encase a bunch of banksies. There's a gay policeman inside that box and he wants you to get better. He wants you to take time for yourself. Okay, all right, all right. What about this? What if everyone in the Conservative Party really loves the noble campaign?

Where they put the bull in the box so you don't talk about bull when you do your mental health or whatever? What if they're like, listen, this was great. We're going to take this country wide. We are boxing up every piece of public art. Yeah, that's right. I think it should be done.

I think we should do this. But we're going to... That's the new like TF demand. When will you box up every piece of public art in the UK? It's all shit. It's all shit. It deserves it. I have an idea.

What if we start with images of like humans and we box those up, right? Yeah, what if we did that? And then what if we turned all of the churches into mosques? Also, that would be fun. I'm going to take all the performance artists and put them in a big box. Yeah.

Yeah, we could ban music. Yeah, all the actual human statues and Covent Garden. Creeping Sharia, yeah, again. Oh, we could... A bunch of ISIS guys trying to smash up a human statue at the hammer. Well, no, how about this? Jordanian chef on memory TV yelling about how Saddam Hussein, God rest him,

would never put a bull in a box. Come on, how about this? How about this? How about this? A human statue encased by a human box. Oh, that's horrible. Then a human just with the Samaritan's number written on his shirt parading around outside.

That itself is public art. You should... Yeah, that's a form of public art. It says a lot about society. Does more to benefit my mental health than anything else that we've... Prince Harry crying as he encases Ed Sheeran in a box is begging not to be in these... I'm sorry, mate.

Technically, you are art and it's for the good of mental health. When you think about it, David Blaine was the first person to invent mental health. He was. That's right. He was. Yeah, he was. Shall we...

Who's ready for a jarring shift in tone? I'm very... I'm so ready for a jarring shift. I love a jarring shift. Let's do the vibe shifts. We're going to put this segment of the podcast in a box for everyone's mental health. We saw the podcast in half.

So I'm going to throw to us in what for you is the future, but for us was the past. In our conversation with Heidi about digital surveillance in South Africa we're going to see you, this group of us in the present, but our future is going to see you in your further future after you're done listening to that. It'll become clear when we do it.

And there's one character you'll notice the absence of in this next segment. Hello, everyone, for this second segment of the show. Which we definitely recorded second. Yeah, I was going to say, I really enjoyed the first segment, by the way. What was your favorite part of the first segment? I think we're already on fire.

It's hard to pick a favorite, I think. Specifically. No, I think really the whole thing was just blasting all the way through was really top notch. Yeah, when Milo did the voice, I found that very funny idea. Oh, yeah, that was very good. Absolutely, yeah. That whole bit about Keir Starmer, fantastic.

Wonderful. However, however, reminiscing about the first segment, which I mean, we could do all day, having misty eyes. Misty eye reminiscing about how much we love. Where are the first segments of yesteryear? No, it's the trash teacher's gone soft now. It's the second half, it's all gone to dogs. If anything, we've moved on for the second half.

We have put aside our childish things. And we are very lucky to be joined today by Heidi Swart, who is a freelance journalist in South Africa. And she has recently co-authored an article for the MIT Technology Review, which we will link in the description of this episode. Which I found at turns fascinating and horrifying, prompting me to reach out to her to ask

if she would come on and talk about it. Perfect trash teacher combo. Entitled, South Africa's private surveillance machine is fueling a digital apartheid. Heidi, thank you very much for coming on the show. No, thanks for having me. So just in the context of the article, right, the overall thrust of it is about how this profusion

of digital technologies, specifically around surveillance technologies that we talk about quite a bit on the show, anything from just the profusion of cameras to the infrastructure to send the data from the cameras, to the AI sort of programs, analyzing all these images, have exacerbated a lot of trends that were already going on in South Africa. But I wanted to know if you could do some table

setting for us, right? If we could talk about the police private security division in South Africa as a remnant of apartheid, how private security became paramilitarized, and just like how we got into the position that surveillance is making so much worse. Yeah, so I suppose one could start off by saying we have a very high crime rate.

It's just something that was always a problem. And after apartheid ended, everyone thought things would get better and crime-wise. We're only really now experiencing the impact of apartheid many, many years afterwards because the damage that was done in those times, you know, people were forcibly removed, people were not given life opportunities.

So it's generations afterwards that have been damaged. So this is what we're sitting with now. The new government hasn't really helped. You know, they've had 30 years to really try to improve things. And well, you know, they really have not done a bang-up job, to be honest. So we have the situation where we had an authoritarian government and then we've had a corrupt government.

And now we still are here with high levels of poverty, high levels of unemployment, and then accompanying high crime levels. So there's nothing extraordinary about that. That's something that's been shown repeatedly, that, you know, these things, they go together. So the problem with the security industry is not that people are trying to combat crime.

People here really do have legitimate concerns for their safety. The crime that occurs here is very violent. You know, usually when people get robbed, there will also be assault involved. We have high levels of sexual assault, high murder rates. You know, a guy would, you know, maybe, you know, steal your cell phone and they just for good measure kill you.

It's that sort of thing that we see happening, high level of violence. So people are extremely afraid. Which is why security companies are so popular, because the police, this is the other half of it, the police have not really managed to keep up with these high crime rates. They're understaffed.

I think they're under-trained. I think they have low morale. And there's very low trust from the public. The public doesn't really trust our police. And so the easy way out is to say, well, we'll just pay for our own policing options. In the area where I live, I speak under correction, but, you know, it's a town with fewer than a million people.

But there's only a handful of police vehicles around. So if you call because someone's broken into your house, you're going to wait a while for the police to arrive. So it makes more sense to say, all right, everyone in the street, let's pull our money and we hire these private guys. Police abolition brackets bad outcome. Basically, yeah, exactly. So that's what'll happen.

People will just, everything just becomes privatized really. So the problem is this, that these guys that operate in the private sector, with the police, there's, you know, there's a lot of focus on them. There are places that you can go to complain about the police. They have to, they're paid by taxpayers, right? And they are accountable to the public. So the arguments that some observers and academics and police officers themselves have raised is that these private industry players,

they work for people who pay them. So they have a profit motive. And they're not necessarily there, you know, governed by strict laws, the way the police services are. There is a private security act. But I mean, it's limited in that body is really limited in its oversight of what these private security services do. You basically have to register with them.

And then you're good to go. The thing is that you have to, you have so many different private security providers. And some of them are in surveillance services during camera installations and so forth. And, you know, just monitoring neighborhoods and such. Others are actually, you know, their specialties response teams, you know, they will come out and see if there's been a robbery. They will come out and actually try and apprehend the people. Others just, you know, transport money, that type of thing.

So, you know, and yet others just, you know, stand around buildings guarding them. So there's a very, there's a wide variety, but there's quite, there's a spectrum really where these guys work. And like I said, there's probably, there's roughly half a million of them are these security guards active in South Africa, which really just dwarfs the police force. Are all of them armed or like some large percentage of them? Is there such a thing as an unarmed guard in South Africa? Yeah, not, not every, not all of them are armed.

You have to have a gun license. This is the thing, not everybody can carry a gun. Some do, but you also, many guards will just have a radio with them and maybe a night stick. So fortunately, it's not a situation where we have half a million guys running around with machine guns. So it's not that. So they can be armed. I am not entirely familiar with how the legislation around that works, but I would imagine that they would have to at the very least have a license for their guns. And, you know, for, to have a firearm license, you, it's a bit harder here to get a firearm. Well, legally, I think, and it would be

in, I don't know, the US is big, but so, so, I mean, you'd have to go for, you don't have to go for, you know, complete physical and stuff like that, but you do need to have some letter from, from mental health professionals and so on, just saying, okay, look, you, you, you're fit to own a gun and you can't own five. You have, you can only have one, you know, so yeah. So, so there is, there are limitations there, but, but they are allowed to use, to use weapons, yeah, but not all of them do. So I want to talk about the, some of the specifics, right, drilling into the surveillance question, right? I'm going to quote from your article in MIT Technology Review, where you talk about, so the, the profusion of cameras owned by these, you know, private profit seeking

companies. You say five years ago, this wouldn't have been possible, speaking of the many cameras with all the fiber optics. Neither of the city's infrastructure nor existing video analytics could support sending and processing footage at the necessary scale, but when fiber coverage expanded, AI capabilities advanced, and companies abroad seeing the opportunity began dumping the latest surveillance technologies into the city, the local security industry, forged under the pressures of this high crime environment, embraced the menu of auction options, and the effect has been the rapid creation of a centralized, coordinated, entirely privatized mass surveillance operation. VumaCam, which you give as, as an example, a company building the nationwide CCTV network

already has 6,600 cameras and counting more than 5,000 of which are concentrated in Johannesburg. The video footage takes feeds and, excuse me, the video footage it takes feeds into security rooms around the country, which then use all manner of AI tools to track population movement and trace individuals. And one, one conclusion that the report that the article comes to, right, is that the overwhelming majority of the people purchasing the surveillance are white, and the overwhelming amount of people surveilled are black, and that this is sort of compared to digital, you call digital passbooks. I wanted to know if you could sort of go into that dynamic a bit. Yeah, so I think the term digital passbooks actually was used originally by a researcher

and writer called Michael Quitt, who's written about this extensively, and his works really worth looking at. So, right, the idea about a passbook is this is an apartheid concept, right? What we had in South Africa were called, they were called homelands, right, specific geographic areas that were demarcated for black people only to live in. They had residents in these homelands, but they did not have residents in South Africa. The minute they moved beyond the borders of these so-called homelands, really, these were just small enclaves within South Africa, much like you would have reservations for Native Americans in the USA. So, it was that sort of thing, except here they could not leave the so-called homeland without a passbook. If you were in a white

area and you don't have your passbook, you were in trouble. You could get locked up, you could get beaten up, sent back home, etc. So it was bad news for you. People needed passbooks, they needed to come from the so-called homelands, come and work in white areas. They either did domestic work, or they did bricklaying work, or they worked in mines, etc. It would be some kind of low-paying job, right? So, today a lot of that hasn't changed. We have a much larger black middle class. There's been a huge improvement in many people's livelihoods, and we also still have a very, very large class of people doing this hard manual labor for little money. And also jobs that are very necessary, but that are considered low skills, like people working in the garden, domestic workers, and so

forth. That setup hasn't really changed. Those people doing those jobs are still primarily black people and they face huge socioeconomic challenges. The only difference is now, they don't have to have passbooks and they can live in the cities or at least near the cities where they work, as opposed to a trip on a bus overnight from the homeland. The problem with cameras and the idea of a digital passbook is that when the people who don't live in these neighborhoods who just walk through them are usually these black people who are just there to work, they're just there to earn an honest day's labor. But these are exactly the people who will be picked up by the cameras and by people surveilling the streets. So, these are the people

that they keep an eye on, and these are the people that will either be flagged as, okay, no, that's not really an incident to be responded to, or yes, let's escalate this because this guy has been standing in front of this gate, of this house for too long. So, I mean, I cannot speak for the rest of the country, but if I think of the neighborhood where I live, which is also predominantly white, there for a long time, I mean, we're not part of the WhatsApp group anymore, but for a long time, there was a WhatsApp group that's still there where people who are in the neighborhood report safety issues. And you can be sure that any issues reported have got absolutely nothing to do with white people. It has to do with black people moving through the white neighborhood

and people not really wanting them to be there. I'm surprised that it's WhatsApp and not like some sort of proprietary app that's taken over that space like something like Citizen Might in the US. No, people here, you see, it's so normal. Okay, and so here's the thing, nobody says it out loud, right? Nobody says, oh, there's a black guy in the street, nobody talks like that, but... No, because that would be racist. Exactly. But you can be sure, you know, that once the person is, so here, I'm going to give you an example. So this is these people, this is on the WhatsApp group, right? So Lady in House A says, okay, right, there's a very suspicious, clapped out city golf coming by here, four guys inside. They don't look like they belong here, right? So then a couple

of minutes later, the man in house B says, no, they just paused us. I don't like to look at them, right? And so it goes... Yeah, they're all wearing football shirts from that team from the neighboring town. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, these people just have very good eyesight. I appreciate that. Then, like, after the... like, then finally the six or seven persons says, okay, those guys are the guys, they're coming to fix my gate. Don't worry about them. So what essentially what we're saying is like companies like, you know, VumaCam, which we'll sort of go into a little bit, have kind of taken that WhatsApp group and said, what if we automated it and put it everywhere in the country? Well, yeah, that's what the fear is. That is my worry, is that you look in our

constitution, we have freedom of movement, right? But I mean, I've worked as a white reporter in affluent white neighborhoods many moons ago, right? I've lived as a white person in more affluent white neighborhoods. I know people who are white, who live in more affluent white neighborhoods. And the idea that there is a discomfort with people who are of another color and who are of lower income groups, walking through the neighborhood, that is something that you see. You see that as a white person. It is a fact. And for me, the cameras are for me, personally, as my personal views, is an extension of that. Because who are they going to be watching? Who are they going to be harassing? And the fact is that, like I said, we have freedom of movement.

People are allowed to go where they want to go. They're allowed to walk through a white neighborhood. The problem is just this. We have no way of ascertaining whether these private security companies actually, how are they going to judge who they will stop and who they won't stop? Who are they going to talk to? Who are they not going to talk to? Who are they going to say, okay, move along, you don't belong here and who not? Everyone is basically seen as a criminal. And that is an aspect of predictive policing. Everyone is a potential criminal. But against the black... Sure. Did you say there's a place where everyone is seen as a criminal? I'm just curious as to whether you think it's like, whether you agree with the impression that I got,

which is that that WhatsApp group, that sort of like state of vigilance, is what security companies, that's a desired outcome for them. Because the more afraid you are, the more vigilant you are, the more security you're going to want to buy, surely? Well, yeah, I mean, exactly. It's something that people really... Security companies have everything to gain and nothing to lose by people's sphere of crime. I mean, without it, I don't think their business models work. Look, I mean, take for example, cameras, security cameras, we don't know that they work. The empirical research that can really affirm whether they're effectiveness in preventing crime or stopping maybe even catching criminals, the evidence is sketchy at best. It varies. I mean,

so for us to be able to say, I'm going to install these cameras here and it's going to make you safer, that's a sweeping statement for which there really is no ground. It's the most dangerous criminological question you can ask is, hey, does any of this work? Like at all? We don't know. And so what's happening is we're giving up our privacy here. For what? What are we giving it up for? I'm very excited to start my South African security company, where I go around to big houses and go, hey, it's a pretty nice house you got here. It would be a shame if some black guys were to loiter outside it. Well, I could arrange that. If you want to talk about privacy, I think one of these sort of stranger happenings, of course, in this story is that as these companies,

not just VUMACAM, but also some of the others, NECXON or iCentry or whatever. That doesn't sound ominous at all. Yeah, it's actually one of the big fight, one of the people, one of the organizations that initially pushed back against this profusion of cameras and analytics and everything was actually the highways agency. And they said that we will not allow these companies to use the South Africa's highways to infringe on citizens privacy. Yeah, so my take on that was that that was an interesting case because the, you know, these type of government bodies aren't really known for giving a crap about people. So to me, it's it was simply cannot relate.

Yeah. Well, yeah, hard to explain, but the government usually doesn't care. So it was really my take on that was that there was some pressure on them. This is my sort of opinion. I think there was some pressure on them from the local communities that and community members that didn't want the cameras. And in response, they tried to, you know, stop granting permission to VUMACAM to actually direct these cameras. It was poorly litigated from the Rose Agency side, I think. I mean, but it it was very interesting. It was very sort of gave you a lot of insight into how the security sector actually thinks about surveillance and privacy, which is really privacy is, you know, privacy is is something that you can give up, you know, easily.

It's not really, I mean, there's no question. It's a no brainer. This stuff makes us safer. Of course, we're going to give up our privacy. That's sort of how they look at it. And there's never any question of giving up your privacy making you, for example, less safe. No, of course. I have to confess, I just did take a peek at the notes and I've just learned who the CEO of VUMACAM is. And may I just put out there right now, name alert, name alert. So let's hear from this is again, quoted in the article, speaking of like, like discussions about privacy and the belief of the surveillance industry about what surveillance manages to accomplish. And so let's hear from the, I'd like to say, amusingly named Ricky Crook.

John Q. Crimes. To catch a criminal, you've got to think like a criminal. I'm sorry. I hope I've gotten that name wrong almost certainly. So please do correct me. No, it's up there with Michael Kill from the British nighttime industries. Yeah, that's right. Michael Kill and Ricky Crook from the university together. Yeah. So let's hear from the amusingly named Ricky Crook. So this is also as he's responding to the claim that, you know, it's sort of, actually, it is, as you said earlier on in this, in this discussion, like it is this extreme inequality that, you know, that drives sort of social unrest and all this. Ricky Crook says, VUMACAM's technology is honed for the purpose of preventing

crime. And as such, does not have mass surveillance capability nor intention. Oh, well, that's okay. He then says that to suggest that. Ricky Crook was quite a saying, don't worry about it. And then, and then suggests that, you know, anyone claiming otherwise is engaging in something intentionally malicious, defamatory, without any basis in truth. John insinuate that I, Ricky Crook, I'm up to no good. So, but what he says, what I want to get into is he says, look, surveillance infrastructure honed on crime is key to curbing and preventing and understanding crime, which currently impedes

the investment in economic growth so critical to job provision and poverty alleviation. So the security industry, the surveillance industry wants to say, no, look, your privacy and the privacy of like all these other people who would just like to walk through the neighborhood is kind of an impediment to us allowing the economic growth to happen that will alleviate the poverty, poverty that will sort of prevent crime. Maybe everyone who's like loitering outside your house allegedly could get a job with one of the security companies. Well, this also sort of just like culminates every, because like one thing I was thinking about while he was talking was, you know, the kind of like sales pitch of this is

really kind, you know, it's in the same way that every kind of surveillance tech sort of presents itself, it is like an exploitation of like very real vulnerabilities. And the idea that like, well, like if the state isn't going to be there to kind of fulfill its basic like purposes to its citizens, then you really have no choice but to sort of let these private sector goons do that, but then simultaneously, and I think this is happening in the UK as well, where like the kind of biggest industries and like tech are, you know, fintech and funnily enough surveillance tech and obviously they have like a relation. But the fact that like government ministers in the UK have sort of like pointed at these two, you know, emerging kind of sectors, and, you know,

believing that ultimately these are the sectors that are going to like keep the economies afloat, like surveillance companies and surveillance technology companies are in this very unique position of like not only presenting themselves as like an economic necessity, but like a social necessity as well. Yeah, it sounds like the South African government might not have the same opinion given this this Rhodes Agency business. So like, what is the sort of government attitude towards these companies, would you say? Well, the Rhodes Agency is just one, I was going to say, tiny fraction of the government and of local government, it's not even of national government. I see. So what's happening is I think, increasingly, the police are working

with private security agencies, especially, you know, using this type of technology to I think the piece also talks about it a bit, you know, to do their own crime fighting. And of course, it suits them because they it's unregulated, right? So if they wanted to you do a number plate search with VURACAM systems, they would just go to a private security company, give them a number plate and say, please, you know, can you can you look for this number for us? Right? And that way, they can, you know, by using their own system, their own system would would require a bit more administration, they have to open some kind of an inquiry docket. And then they would be able to, you know, link that to VURACAM systems, and, you know, maybe find or get a result. But if you go

straight to security firm, you give them the number, then you can, you know, skip all your own admin. The thing is this, the VURACAM is also linked to the police's wanted vehicle database, right? So that there's a link there. So they can, it's just a database of number plates of vehicles that have been involved in a crime, or that maybe, you know, have been stolen, etc. So VURACAM can pick up a number plate belonging to one of those vehicles. And so that there's already an official link between VURACAM and the police right there. And then the second layer is VURACAM, the police actually saying, wait, are you, we're not even going to use our own own database, we're just going to feed it to our feed our wanted vehicle

number plates to one of VURACAM clients. That's even quicker. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah. Well, it's, it's, it links to actually something else that you talk about sort of towards the end of the piece as well, right? Which is that there are, that there are now currently discussions between, I don't think it wasn't VURACAM, it was one of the others, with just linking an entire database of everyone in the country's photo up to their facial recognition systems, so that the, they can sort of track anyone anywhere. Well, you see, this is the, that is the absolute worst case scenario. And that is theoretically possible. And I think it's also, it's the direction

in which we're moving. We're not there yet, but it is the direction in which we're moving. Facial recognition is getting, you know, better quite quickly, as you know. And if you had a good enough surveillance camera network, right? And you could pair it with good enough facial recognition that's then connected to, for example, let's say our government's national population registry. It would, it wouldn't mean that if you connected those systems that you could not only find me in my government's, you know, database, you could also potentially pull up all my locations based on, for example, my LPR camera hits, license plate registration camera hits on my car. And whenever my face was captured by your, your camera system.

And this need not be, these need not be cameras that are, you know, facing the street. I'm talking about cameras placed at ATM, as you enter and exit shopping malls, etc. So, so they might not capture your, you know, every single step, but you will certainly, they will certainly have enough data points, you know, to sort of pinpoint your movements. The point is just that it's becoming easier and easier to integrate these different systems. And the systems are becoming more and more capable. And the relationship between government and the government wanting these services and the company, the private companies offering these services are getting stronger and stronger. So for me, that is, that is, you know, the, that's where it's, it seems to be moving.

We don't know if it's going to get there. We don't know when it's going to get there. But it certainly is something to look out for. And one of the things that you've described just sort of by way of sort of thinking about the, well, well, what next question in another way is that quite often, you know, you even you say this towards the beginning of the piece as well, is that international private security companies love to just come and just try shit out in South Africa. And that South Africa can end up being a bit of a model or a testing ground for how surveillance gets done in the rest of the world. Yeah, so that idea. Okay, so look, we have a lot of, there are a lot of people entrepreneurs in South Africa, people want to make money here.

Right. I mean, Vroomar Chem is one case. There's another company called AI Surveillance. I think that we also interviewed my colleague, interviewed this guy in the piece from AI Surveillance. And those guys, they're entrepreneurs. Yes, overseas companies are looking for sales here, but the people that are driving it are South Africans themselves. I think overseas players just provide the technology. They're just here to say, all right, where can we sell? So yeah, it is important, yeah, let's dump our tech into the country, but it is also local people and our government as well, our government agencies as well, they are all too eager to purchase the stuff. Sort of a symbiotic relationship, like you mentioned with the police.

Yeah, it's a lose-lose to the rest of us. Yeah, whoever wins, we lose. Fantastic. That's right. Well, alien versus crook. I just wanted to say, I think that's about all we have time for in this segment. So Heidi, I wanted to thank you so much for coming and talking us through this today. This was very interesting, if also chilling. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great talking to you guys. And yeah, thanks for taking the time. You can check out Heidi's article and the show notes. And we're also going to link her Twitter there as well. So give her a follow there. Anyway, I'm going to throw... Check up on her movements. Legally speaking, do not do that. Legally speaking, that is not allowed to do unless

you're a women camp. Terms and conditions apply. Ricky Crook accepted. So we're going to go back to us in the future past to finish the outro. Thank you very much, us from mere moments ago, plus a couple of unusable minutes, by the way, I might add. And what would I is about? And I want to just say, thank you very much for listening to the show. I had a whole segment on the Queen's speech and how like it's weird. Not important. Put the Queen in a box. I don't give a shit. I think the Queen might be closer. It's going to be so good for the... Now that is the prestige to safeguard the nation's mental health. We are putting the Queen in a box. She's not dead. I can't stress enough that she is not dead. She's volunteering to go in the box

in order to improve and to ensure she doesn't come out of the box and ruin the mental health again. We're going to bury her. She's alive. Her favorite music is on down there. She's got an air tube. It's not a problem. She's been trained by magicians for this. This is what it's about. Her Majesty the Queen has entered a box. And if you're feeling low, the number for the Samaritans is on the side of the box. I'm down here in a hole in the ground with Ed Sheeran. I have to say, Ed, I can feel the shape of you. To serve her in the afterlife. Due to the size of this box. A court loot player, Ed Sheeran.

Oh my. I hope you enjoyed that jarring shifting tone. Anyway, I was going to talk about how the Queen's speech is basically saying, oh, we're back to all 40 stories and we're boring. So I want to say thank you for listening to this free episode of TF. Don't forget, there is a bonus episode. It is $5 a month. You can get a second episode every week. I nearly remembered. I nearly remembered. I nearly didn't remember the business model of my own show. So excellent work there. We will see you on the bonus. I really enjoyed the collaboration you did with Devlin.